April 2013 is a historic month for the mobile phone. You might not know this already but the 3rd of this month was the 40th anniversary of the first ever mobile phone call.

While most of us joined the mobile revolution long after this, it was on this day back in 1973 when a chap called Martin Cooper made history with a Motorola device. He was a senior engineer at Motorola and he called someone at another phone firm and said that he was making the call from a “real cellular telephone”.

Last year a survey carried out by the International Telecommunication Union stated that there were now more than 6 billion mobile phone phones in use in the world, which was only 1 billion less than the total number of inhabitants of the planet at the time.

An Incredible Pace of Change

The incredible pace of change in this industry means that we have moved from chunky, basic phones to stunning smartphones in a relatively short space of time. The future of mobile phones also looks interesting, with technology experts predicting wearable devices which work in harmony with more of our body’s sense than they currently do.

The man who made that historic first phone call is now 85 years old and he has admitted that the high cost of buying a big, chunky phone at the start seemed to be a factor which was going to make it difficult for them to be become very popular. Having said that, he said that he and his colleagues at the time had pictured future phones which would be a lot smaller and which could be hung on the user’s ear or be “embedded under your skin”.